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 24, WHAT IS LIFE 



science depends very much on their influencing one 

 another and advancing simultaneously." 



In his presidential address (1920) before the British 

 Medical Association, Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, 

 late Regius Professor of Physics in the University of 

 Cambridge, said: "Research, as it is working today, 

 advances from fixed and measured bases; as obser- 

 vation it watches nature's march past; then as 

 experiment it puts events to test under artificial 

 conditions of separation or isolation, and measures 

 their phases. But the laboratory cannot, as nature 

 does, contrive the unexpected; so we must 'gear up 

 our tiny machines to the vast wheel of nature,' and 

 try for a first roughing out of an idea or concept. 

 If we are to select our facts to any considerable pur- 

 pose as crucial, we must first have an idea in our 

 minds; and for this a certain kind of imagination is 

 needed." 



All of the brilliant modern discoveries have been 

 possible only because venturesome minds have dared 

 to speculate. But the inexorable demand is that 

 every hypothesis must have a firm basis in facts. 

 In no sense may it be a mere unsupported guess. 

 With Sir John Herschel: "To experience we refer, as 

 the only ground of all physical inquiry." There is 

 no such thing as subserving truth in the abstract 

 by the sacrifice of concrete truths. One adverse 



